This thread was mostly an exercise for myself to step back from a report a few days after it came out and to try get more consistent with Bluesky posting, but if anyone's made it this far the full report is here: doi.org/10.26504/rs207

14/14

Some take-homes are:
(1) there's no evidence for an urban-rural divide
(2) the public lack clear guidance on dietary emissions
(3) farmers are broadly onboard but could do with support
(4) a small climate 'resistant' group may drive misperceptions if given disproportionate airtime
13/14

It may instead be driven by a small subgroup who appear resistant to policies and report very low levels of concern about climate change. But we find evidence for people with these views in rural and urban communities too.
12/14

So, given all of this evidence, why might there be a perception that farmers are anti-climate action?

(Some) farmers are indeed less likely to recognise the climate impact of eating meat and are less supportive of restrictive farming policies - but the differences are pretty small.
11/14

So farmers are broadly concerned and supportive of some forms of climate action. Why don't we see more climate-friendly farming practices?

We find considerable scope for improving farmer awareness of these practices, some of which may be easy wins:

10/14

Across a range of climate policies, we also see broadly similar levels of support across the three groups.

(There are some differences for specific policies, with farmers less supportive of reducing the national herd than the public (2.2 vs. 3.5-3.8), but little difference on most).

9/14

Which may be partly driven by the public underestimating how worried farmers are about climate change.
8/14

Almost half of farmers even cite climate change as one of the top issues they face (not sig different to the proportion who cite excessive regulation!)

The public also underestimate how many farmers struggle with negative perceptions of farming.
7/14

When it comes to concern, the distribution of worry in all groups is broadly similar. Though it looks like there may be fewer farmers at the 'extremely worried' end, the differences aren't even close to statistically significant (ps > .78).

(Note the distribution uptick at 1 though!)
6/14

Farmers do substantially worse on the plant-based item, and we have some evidence that this is a form of motivated reasoning -> the difference is driven by beef and dairy farmers.

But it's also worth noting that majorities of all groups are poor on dietary emissions.
5/14

Where we do find a difference is on understanding of what individual actions matter.

Farmers do slightly worse than the public (but again, if anything, the rural-urban divide favours rural).
4/14

We also find no difference in their understanding of what sectors are most responsible for emissions (with no improvement from when we first measured this 3 years ago.)

Concerningly, 1 in 3 farmers and the same proportion of the public don't identify agriculture as one of the big emitters

3/14

We find no reliable differences in knowledge of the effects of climate change between rural residents, urban residents and farmers. (If anything, rural respondents did slightly better!) 2/14

@isweconomics.bsky.social - if you haven’t already come across this!